1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to skills-based communication routing. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to adding agents to a pool of selected agents based on a skill level for accomplishing a task associated with a call and based on an estimated wait value for an available agent.
2. Background Information
Organizations operate call centers to enable interaction with customers placing calls to the organization. Examples of organizations that use call centers include utility and mail order catalog companies as well as companies that offer technology products and services. A call center processes a volume of call traffic by servicing requests made by callers. These requests may be directed to product information, billing inquiries, modifying a customer's preferences and technical support for products offered by the organization. Call traffic is processed by routing calls to a group of call center agents that service requests associated with each call. Calls are subsequently queued and scheduled for servicing by a particular agent in the group.
Call centers need to effectively route calls to agents to reduce the amount of time a caller must wait before their request is serviced. Calls are routed to agents based on an estimated waiting time for servicing requests. More particularly, calls are routed to an agent for which the estimated waiting time is the shortest. If the agent has a relatively few number of calls waiting in queue or if the agent is able to process calls faster than other agents, the estimated waiting time for the agent is shorter.